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Is There Personal Branding in the Afterlife? Thinking About Online Memorials

Hoping everyone had a great Memorial Day holiday. While the purpose of Memorial Day is to commemorate the service of the men and women who have given their lives in the service of their country, I’m using it as jumping off point to think more philosophically about online memorials in general, and specifically, how our digital presences might live on without us online.

Online memorials done by the living for the lost are not new; USA Today last week had a roundup of some military-focused memorial sites and Google Earth released a Map the Fallen map to honor those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the civilian sphere, we’ve also seen funeral homes and obituary listings add guestbooks, group albums, and other forms of interactivity.

From the simplest Web page to the most elaborate official registry, online memorials make people’s achievements accessible, and the interactivity inherent in sharing memories around the dead turns static memorials into nodes for community. After all, as we know, memorials aren’t really for the dead — they’re for the living.

But What Happens to Our Stuff When We Die?
NPR had a piece last week on the death of suicide prevention pioneer Edwin Shneidman (here’s the complete LA Times audio slideshow [contains a few BS-words]). Without getting into the stickier potential discussions on theology and ontology, I’ll just focus on this quote:

“I’ll be dead. And I ‘live’ in my children, in my DNA, in my books, in my reputation.”

To the reputation and legacy bits, we can add in all the stuff that you’ve published online during your lifetime.

Historically, once you achieved a certain bit of fame or notoriety, your body of work had a pretty good chance of outlasting your body, in the pages of books, or the dusty archives of a newspaper’s morgue. If you weren’t famous, maybe you’d live on in a scrapbook, or tax records, or other documents unearthed by a future social historian looking for insight into the life of the everyday person.

With the democratizing effects of the Internet, and the changing expectations of fame and visibility, regular people now have the chance to see and shape the digital legacy that will remain accessible to others after they’re gone. That is, if we can solve that whole impermanence problem — they say that everything you publish is online, forever, but that’s an aphorism, not an archival strategy. Though you can bet that there are businesses looking to cover the needs of preserving your digital life in death, as outlined in this CNN article.

Personal Branding in the Afterlife?
Efforts to maintain your digital self after you’re gone sound suspiciously like an attempt at personal branding in the afterlife. Is there a market for online reputation management after you’re dead? All the usual advice to managing your reputation doesn’t really apply when you can’t reply (because you’re dead). You’re going to need a proxy, someone motivated by either love or money. And this is a real application of trust — after all, you’re not going to be around to check up on folks.

Worry about your digital legacy is a conceit of the living. At a certain point, though, it’s probably better to remember that on a long-enough timeframe, what you’ve done isn’t going to matter too much to people, and it’s more useful to worry about what you’re doing now, than what you’re going to be remembered for.

Are you making provisions for your legacy after you pass? Leave a comment (which will add to your digital body of work).

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